I tried quite a few CMS’s lately (thinking of creating a family site), and I like the Drupal distinction between administration and content creation (different link, select story/page/whatever, enter text and publish), and the easy ability to specify who can post and edit what.
However, Drupal is pretty primitive as is, and there are a lot of other CMS’s that look better out of the box and offer more features. However, the ones I saw treat content creation as part of administration. I.e., it looks more complex than I think a simple user would be comfortable with.
It may be of course that I’m just missing something, since I’m new to CMS’s and haven’t dedicated enough to learning each one (since there’s a huge number of CMS’s).
Anyway, I’d appreciate some insight into CMS’s which can allow me to easily create a “content creator” user type who’ll be able to create/edit content using a simple content creation interface and have no other admin privileges (so will be able to edit only their own page, not others, for example).
I imagine this is a function of many CMS scripts, as far as I am aware.
I would certainly recommend that you go with Wordpress.
This, in my experience is by far the simplest and cleanest working, and will do everything that you need it to do. You can create users which can be allocated different roles, such as ‘Administrator’ for yourself, or maybe ‘editor’ for example for each family member.
I’ll be my typical self and throw in Expressionengine - it allows you to define as many types of user as you want. Each user can then be assigned permissions however you want them. Typically you might have something like:
Super Admin - access to everything
Tecchie - can only access system functions
Chief editor - access to modify all content, but not system functions
Editor - can publish, moderate, edit specified content
Author - can create content but not publish to the live site
Guest editor - can submit content to author/editors for vetting and/or approval
Specific editor - can create for just one or more types of content, ie can create a news item but can’t publish to and other area
Tea boy - can only post to the internal staff gallery
I think you’re correct about missing something in your analysis, particularly with Drupal. It’s hard for me to believe how much I disliked Drupal several years ago but it’s because I didn’t really “get it”. It’s a framework and you can use it for a simple 5- 10 page brochure website or a site that manages hundreds of user profiles, books events, tracks subscriptions and signups, does job applications, etc… I’ve used it for both types and many in between.
The thing with Drupal is that out of the box, it’s just a canvas. I think Drupal 7 will have more features out of the box but with Drupal 6 you have to get a few modules before it becomes really flexible… I always add admin_menu, cck, views, tinytinymce, token, pathauto before I do anything. If you do a lot of Drupal sites, you can set up a sort of automatic install script so that all of your favorites are installed whenever you start a project.
You can create as many types of users as you need and then use the permissions panel to give them the bare essentials that they need to get their job done.
If you find Drupal too overwhelming with all of the options (and I can understand how that might happen), give WordPress a go.
